[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, TCM, YouTube.]
The Wayward Bus (dir. Victor Vicas, 1957). From a 1947 novel by John Steinbeck. Imperfect strangers are changed in the course of a rugged journey by bus from the Salinas Valley to San Juan de la Cruz, Mexico. There’s the risk-taking driver (Rick Jason), his heavy-drinking wife back home at their café (Joan Collins), a dancer/stripper on her way to a job (Jayne Mansfield), a traveling salesman (Dan Dailey), a prim couple in a “sweet and clean” marriage and their fragile daughter (Larry Keating, Kathryn Givney, Dolores Michaels), a boy and girl from the café (Dee Pollock, Betty Lou Keim), and an old fellow (Will Wright) on his way to get married. Hard to say more without giving everything away. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Amateur (dir. Hal Hartley, 1994). Isabelle Huppert is an ex-nun in Manhattan, trying to earn a living writing pornographic stories. Elina Löwenshon is a porn star trying to break away from the business. Martin Donovan is a man with amnesia whose story makes all the parts fall into place. Stylish, suspenseful, grimly funny, and reminiscent, in all those ways, of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva. ★★★★ (CC)
[How dated a movie from the recent past can look: pay phones, video stores, indoor smoking, 3.5″ floppy disks, which, as someone points out, are neither floppy nor round.]
*
Chess Story (dir. Philipp Stölzl, 2021). An adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella with two major changes: the movie drops the frame story, in which a traveler recounts an ocean voyage, and it transforms the story within that story, of a Viennese notary who studies a chess book to keep his mind intact during imprisonment by the Nazis, into a narrative that blurs the line between reality and hallucination. Oliver Masucci, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Zweig, gives a brilliant performance as Dr. Josef Bartok (the novella’s Dr. B.), a man determined not to fall apart. No wonder the opening lines of the Odyssey run through his story. And apt words from Zweig’s address to the 1941 PEN Congress appear on screen at the movie’s end: “Es ist an uns heute, den Glauben an die Unbesiegbarkeit des Geistes trotz allem und allem unerschütterlich aufrechtzuerhalten” [It is for us today to maintain our belief in an unconquerable spirit]. ★★★★ (YT)
[Oliver Masucci as Dr. Josef Bartok.]
[It’s finally available to buy or stream.]
*
Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (dir. Lili Horvát, 2020). Natasa Stork is Vizy Márta, a Hungarian-born (last name first) neurosurgeon who leaves her practice in New Jersey for a romantic rendezvous in Budapest with a fellow practitioner Drexler János (Viktor Bodó) whom she met at a conference. But János has no idea who she is. Did lonely Márta even meet him, or is this attachment all in her head? Like Chess Story, this movie too blurs the line between reality and hallucination. ★★★★ (CC)
*
Superior (dir. Erin Vassilopoulos, 2021). Identical, wildly different twins: Marian (Alessandra Mesa), a singer in a band, and Vivian (Anamari Mesa), a tidy housewife. When Marian drops in for an unannounced extended visit (preparing, she says, for a recording session), the sisters find themselves trading places (as of course identical twins will) and coming up against grave danger. With 1980s decor and fashion, and nods to Kiss Me Deadly and Rear Window. A short prequel with the same title, also streaming, gives more context for the sisters’ early lives on the shores of Lake Superior. ★★★★ (CC)
[Vivian and Marian: two actors doing the one-actor-on-both-sides-of-a-doorway trope.]
*
Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz (dir. Barry Avrich, 2019). A documentary about the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, who died earlier this month. At the age of twenty-seven, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz took on that work and never stopped working for justice, later helping to bring about the creation of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Ferencz’s insistence that crimes against humanity must never get a pass — the Nuremberg trials gave us the word genocide — has enormous resonance for our time. My one misgiving about this documentary: the epic-sounding music, which seems out of proportion to such a modest, unassuming man. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Third Secret (dir. Charles Crichton, 1964). A London psychologist appears to have killed himself, but his daughter Catherine Whitset (Pamela Franklin) insists that one of patients killed him, and she pleads with a television commentator, Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd) (himself a one-time patient), to investigate. Four patients are suspects: an art dealer, a judge, a lonely secretary, and Stedman himself. Muddy black-and-white landscapes, enigmatic passages from Hamlet and Lear chalked on a wall, and a spare score by Richard Arnell help establish an eerie atmosphere. The movie explores all three kinds of secrets. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Home Before Dark (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1958). I think this movie must be Jean Simmons’s finest performance. Simmons plays Charlotte Bronn, just released after a year’s stay in a state mental hospital and returning to a house (left to her by her father) inhabited by her ambitious, sex-averse philosophy professor husband (Dan O’Herlihy), her domineering stepmother (Mable Albertson), and her buxom stepsister (Rhonda Fleming). Another complication: a new philosophy prof (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) living as a boarder. With overtones of the Cinderella story and Gaslight, it’s a slow, brooding treatment of a woman going to pieces in a bleak New England winter. ★★★★ (TCM)
*
The Guilty (dir. John Reinhardt, 1947). From our household’s ideal year for movies, but this one’s a stinker, even if it’s from a Cornell Woolrich story. It’s a low-budget effort about murder, romantic rivalries, and identical twins (played by Bonita Granville), and it’s absolutely bewildering. For starters: which twin is which? Jack Wrather, the producer (and Granville’s husband) went to much better things with TV’s Lassie. ★ (YT)
*
Without Honor (dir. Irving Pichel, 1949). A superior B-movie, playing out in real time, almost all of it spent in a modest San Fernando Valley house — so someone must have been thinking about Aristotelian unities. And someone was likely thinking about Ibsen: witness the line “Things like this don’t happen.” Laraine Day is an adulterous housewife hiding a terrible secret in the laundry room; Bruce Bennett is her dim husband; Dane Clark is her sinister brother-in-law. A strange bonus: we get to see the delivery and unboxing of a tabletop television set. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Somebody Somewhere, first season (created by Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, 2022–2023). Another Sunday night, and I think of this series as the antidote to Succession: funny and humane (and deserving of a much larger audience). Sam (Bridget Everett) returns to Manhattan, Kansas, to care for her dying sister, and ends up staying on. Her mother’s a hapless alcoholic; her father is just hapless; her sister is mired in a marital mess that suggests a Hallmark movie gone bad. Sam’s newfound family of choice in Manhattan is another story: a gay show-choir alum (Jeff Hiller), a trans soil scientist (Murray Hill), a Black veterinarian (Mercedes White), all members of the lively crowd that gathers for “choir practice” — covert nights of cabaret in a dying mall. ★★★★ (HBO)
*
Up the Down Staircase (dir. Robert Mulligan, 1967). I am always willing to watch this movie again again. This time I watched the school: the enormous classroom windows, the globe lights, the desks in rows, the teacher’s locked closet, the safety-fence staircases, the ugly auditorium — all reminiscent of my Brooklyn elementary school. And I watched the supporting players: Patrick Bedford (the sardonic Paul Barringer), Roy Poole (the non-nonsense J.J. McHabe), Eileen Heckart (the make-English-a-game Henrietta Pastorfield). And I watched Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis) take her wins where she finds them. ★★★★ (TCM)
Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)
